Ask Paul: June 19 ⭐

Happy Friday! We’re winding down after a week in Nashville, which has been fantastic despite the heat and humidity. But we’re not done yet, so let’s get this weekend started.

“Microsoft confirms Recycle Bin bug across all versions of Windows”

It’s never really recycled anything when you think about it

🪟 Always in motion is the future

spacecamel asks:

Any word on Windows 12? I am wondering if this new direction to improve Windows 11, that Windows 12 (or whatever they call it) will be pushed back some.

We’ve been talking about Windows 12 since, well, Windows 11 arrived, though Microsoft has never even suggested that such a thing is coming. (Until interesting, go figure, when it said ahead of Build that it would not be announcing Windows 12 at the show.) But this talk really gained steam in 2023, when Microsoft jumpstarted the AI era that went on to be dominated by others, first OpenAI with ChatGPT, and then Anthropic Claude, Google, and all the rest.

The history there is interesting.

In early January 2023, before Microsoft announced what it later named Copilot, I wrote Maybe AI is the Next Wave (Premium) because of rumors that Microsoft would soon announced OpenAI ChatGPT-based features for Bing. I explained Microsoft’s investments in OpenAI and its work on what we now call local AI, starting with Surface Pro X, the first Surface PC to include a Neural Processing Unit (NPU). And then-Windows lead Panos Panay had said that “AI is going to reinvent how you do everything you do on Windows … quite literally.” At the time, the local AI innovations required Arm CPUs, which were otherwise terrible, but we knew those capabilities were coming to x86 CPUs soon, too. And so I figured that was the dividing line: Windows 12, as I called it, would require an NPU.

I followed up that previous article with Welcome to the AI Era (Premium) after Satya Nadella said that Microsoft would bring the new ChatGPT-based AI capabilities to “every Microsoft product.” But that article, like Nadella, focused on Office and Microsoft 365. So In early February, I wrote This is Windows 12 (Premium) in an attempt to bring it all together. Windows 12 would differentiate from Windows 11 by requiring an NPU and it would include whatever mix of local and cloud AI. (I was half-right: The cloud AI stuff would just come to Windows 11 while the local AI stuff would come to Copilot+ PCs a year later.)

Then Microsoft began using the Copilot name. It announced Microsoft 365 Copilot, and then, at Build 2023, that Copilot was coming to Windows 11. And then it raised the bar on enshittification by delivering Copilot in Windows 11 one month ahead of the major version upgrade, 23H2, that was to have included that feature. It did so to force it on its corporate customers, which would have otherwise skipped 23H2 and delayed the spread of Copilot in Windows 11 for a year. So in October 2023, I wrote Waiting for Windows 12 (Premium), reflecting on what had happened and what might happen next. Panay delivered his worst-ever presentation at Build and then left Microsoft. Stevie Bathiche deliver his best-ever presentation at Build and prepared us for a future of copilots that worked alongside current apps, AI-infused apps, and then AI as apps, essentially. Qualcomm announced that it had solved the problems with Arm chips for Windows and Nadella said that Copilot would essentially be the new Start button. Pavan Davuluri took over Windows and talked about hybrid AI apps. But where was Windows 12?

We got Copilot+ PCs instead, that’s what. That happened in mid-2024, with the announcement at Build in May and the first PCs in June. This allowed Microsoft to ship AI in Windows 11, an OS that was already in use by hundreds of millions of people, ensuring an audience, and one that would grow even more when Windows 10 exited support. And Copilot+ PC gave PC makers new hardware to sell with an elevated set of experiences thanks to higher-end components and more powerful NPUs that could drive local AI. So we had cloud AI in Windows and local AI in Copilot+ PCs. What we didn’t have, and still don’t have, is Windows 12.

So the theory now is that Windows 12 could either replace Copilot+ PC in the sense that its hardware requirements will match or exceed those of Copilot+ PC today or that it will simply replace Windows 11, which feels a bit fuzzier but has to happen eventually. Keeping Windows 11/12 and Copilot+ PC around makes some sense as they provide two tiers of experiences. But at some point, that hybrid AI app thing that Davuluri mentioned in September 2023 would have to come together. And that’s starting to happen today, with the conversation shifting to agents. Agents that might orchestrate where work happens between local and cloud AI. So perhaps that is what Windows 12 will be, though Microsoft is working on adding agents to the Taskbar in Windows 11 as we speak. (It’s allegedly added this functionality already, though I’ve never seen it.)

Windows 11 version 26H1 comes with Qualcomm Snapdragon X2-based PCs only and it will not be upgradeable to Windows 11 version 26H2. So maybe what upgrade it does get will be called Windows 12. We’re playing a waiting game here.

Do you think they could use their effort to reduce the hardware requirements as a way to help with hardware sales?

No, I think the reverse: Whatever happens here, if there is a Windows 12 or we just continue with Windows 11 and Copilot+ PC, Windows 11 is the one that supports lower-end hardware. This shouldn’t be confused with how the Windows 11 hardware requirements have a cutoff at 2017-era Intel Core 8th Gen chips or their equivalents, that’s not changing. Low-end doesn’t mean old, it means modern but low-end. New generation processors like the Intel Core Series 3 “Wildcat” and Qualcomm Snapdragon C chips. The hardware requirements (4 GB of RAM, 64 GB of storage) don’t have to change. Windows 12, if it happens in the next year, will have higher-end requirements. Otherwise, we just move forward with Copilot+ PCs, though some of those capabilities are coming to PCs without good NPUs too.

These things don’t always line up, but let’s think about the timing of things for a moment. Those who don’t learn from history and so on.

Microsoft released Windows 10 in 2015 and then announced Windows 11 six years later, in 2021 (and shipped it just four months later).

Microsoft released Windows 8 in 2012 and then announced Windows 10 in 2014 (after shipping two big sets of updates to fix the issues) and release it in 2015, so just three years later.

Microsoft released Windows 7 in 2009, three years after Vista.

Microsoft released Vista in 2005 (businesses) and 2006 (consumers), five years after Windows XP, but there were delays because of the Longhorn fiasco, and there was an XP SP2 release in there too.

Basically, the time frames are getting longer. But if the Windows 10 to 11 delta is mirrored with Windows 11 to 12, then the right time frame is really 2027. So that could be an announcement this year and a release next year. Or it could be further out. We can’t say.

“Google is opening the world’s first AI museum in Los Angeles”

Many people are eager for AI to be something we see in a museum

🎸 Nashville

Alex Strickland asks:

Welcome to Nashville; the humidity will welcome you whether you want it or not.

The humidity here is debilitating. Which is too bad, because this is otherwise an impressive city. I’d only been here one time before, in 2004 when I spoke about Longhorn (!) in Huntsville, Alabama and my wife and I spent a long weekend here ahead of that. But it’s gorgeous. There’s a lot of history, there’s an incredible food scene. There’s the obvious Music City scene, which I love despite not being into country music at all. And weird affectations with cowboy hats and boots, which seem out of place in a modern city in the 21st century when no one is hitching up a horse outside a bar or engaging in any ranching or cowboy activities. But whatever. It’s beautiful. We’ll come back much more quickly next time.

“We now know when and how the Universe may truly end”

This is totally relevant for a tech blog. Oh wait, is it AI?

🎮 What man could want them now?

Alex Strickland asks:

With all the changes that are happening with the studios that Microsoft acquired over the past years, could you see someone like Sony or Tencent acquiring any of these studios to try to let them continue their work?

Absolutely. I think we’re going to see a range of outcomes here for studios, games, and individuals, too.

Sony or some other big game publisher like EA is of course an option.

The team/studio going solo and acquiring the IP to all or some of their games will make sense. I could even see XBOX just letting them take IP for free if it’s been a money loser.

The team/studio going solo but not taking the IP will happen too, similar to when Bungie left Microsoft.

And so on. But the biggest issue, of course, is the entire business and whether Microsoft keeps it or spins it off in total or in parts. Everything appears to be on the table, and if we could at least give Microsoft some credit here, it’s done an impressive job stewarding many game franchises over time (Halo, Gears, Flight Simulator, Minecraft, etc.), just as it has with some non-game acquisitions like GitHub. There are exceptions, as always, but Microsoft can’t and won’t just screw the industry and all the fans and employees who make games. It will try to do the right thing, and it feels like that’s what it’s working through now. Like many, I have a vague sense of dread here but also a hope that it will work out, whatever happens. We should know more soon given the end of the fiscal year is less than two weeks away. This is the time.

“Google lost a court fight against a 2023 US warrant in a Jan. 6 pipe bomb probe”

Please stop copying Apple all the time

The paradox is real

eric_rasmussen asks:

I’ve been hearing reports of the latest Windows 11 update causing boot issues, BitLocker failures, broken OneDrive integration, etc. I’ve been holding back updates until we get more information, but what have you heard?

Every day, I wake up and read the news, and this generally involves literally reading the news, meaning mainstream news, before heading to my tech feeds and then, if there’s time, to a book or whatever else. And there aren’t too many days when I don’t see some version of a story in my tech feeds that concerns some issue in whatever Windows 11 update causing issues for people. Lately, BitLocker seems to be a big one for whatever reason, but it is notable in some ways.

But here’s the thing. I use Windows 11 all day every day on any number of PCs. And while this may not be literally true, I can’t recall ever be impacted by any of the issues I’ve seen stories about. I realize my experience is still technically anecdotal, but I’m not just using a single PC all the time like many, and I use many more PCs than most people. So I’m not sure what to say.

I do live in a constant state of software testing in one sense, and many but not all of my PCs are in the Windows Insider Program, which is important for the books and podcasts and whatever else. But … I don’t know what to make of all this. I just don’t see it myself. Like, ever.

How does this fit with the “Windows 11 is a priority again” messaging? Do they really have big teams working on Windows 11 again? There have been some meaningful changes coming out that I really like, but broken updates surprised me if they’ve got people really paying attention to this stuff again.

It is perhaps notable that we’re seeing more issues, or at least seem to be seeing more issues, ever since Pavan Davuluri said that his team would fix pain points in Windows. And that part of this work involves, literally, updates. But if I could put this on its head, I think we need to consider a few pertinent facts.

Davuluri inherited a mess of a product was staffed by C-teamers, not even B-teamers, and while I know this sounds unfair, I think of the previous group, especially those during the Panay era, as well-meaning dufuses at best. Microsoft just stopped caring about the quality of Windows, and it showed, and it wasn’t given this platform the attention it needed for a long, long time. Reversing all the bad that came out of that can’t happen overnight.

Among the many complaints I had about this time was that there was little to no serious foundational work occurring, with most of the updates we saw being surface-level nonsense, crap built on top of an increasingly less-well-understood and creaky foundation. All the best talent had left Windows client long ago. But Pavuluri took what I will call Window Core, the bit that includes Windows Server, out of Azure and commingled that with Client for the first time in ages. So that’s the start of what I’ll call the “real” work to fix Windows. He announced it early this year, but that started last Fall.

As part of the current pain points work, the Windows team is finally working on low-level, foundational improvements. These are areas of Windows that, again, haven’t been touched in a long time. So it’s breaking things. There appears to be some need to identify some list of things to fix, communicate that to the public, and then actually deliver it all within a relatively short time period, which I think of as October 2026, not coincidentally. And the list of things that are already fixed, soon will be, or are otherwise underway and can be seen in the Insider program is impressive.

I’m going to write something soon about the work I’m doing to “fix” the Windows 11 Field Guide, a book that has grown too big and heavy, and while I am one person with a book and Windows is enormous with hundreds of employees and un untold number of moving parts, I think there are parallels. There are things I’ve not really looked at in too long. Things I am super-familiar with and things I am not. I keep running into bizarre blockers, some of which I will discuss soon, and, in short, I get it. I see the daunting nature of fixing this complex thing, I know it can’t happen overnight, and yet I want to get it done as quickly as possible while still making it right.

The book is my fault, really. But Windows is not Davuluri’s fault, or his team’s fault. They just have to fix it. They will make mistakes, but those mistakes will not be negligent as they were in the past, and they certainly won’t be malicious, as they also were, sometimes, in the past. I think they will get it right.

“The new Google Home Speaker is a slap in the face to Nest Audio users”

Yeah, they were so well-supported before this

It is the way

Markld asks:

About 5 months ago I installed Zorin 18 OS on a Lenovo Workstation desktop. I find I switch between my Windows 11 Workstation and Zorin equally at the moment. I like it on my laptop but its my desktop where it is fantastic. I could not he happier with Zorin, its actually over taking the use of Windows more and more.

I get that. Linux distributions are all over the map, which is just one part of the complexity of switching, and that ranges from windowing managers to package managers and a lot more. Sometimes, you land on one that just resonates with you.

Before the current switching series, I was a big fan of Zorin OS and Elementary OS, and I like that nothing I’ve done this year diminished that. They’re still solid, and excellent. But a few distributions have surprised me in a very positive way, like Fedora Workstation. And others have been bad experiences, like, oddly, the KDE version of Fedora Workstation.

These things can be difficult to explain or understand. Sometimes it’s some subjective preference about the look and feel. Sometimes something will just work in a way that is very pleasing. Sometimes it’s as simple as hardware, where one laptop will work great with one distribution but not with another (or vice versa). One’s experiences here are as all over the map as are these distributions themselves. It’s almost too much.

I know Windows has powershell and commands too, however, linux and its succinct commands[at least for me] are the real reason I like using it, and Zorin has all my favorite apps that Windows has. Curious if you think the same way or not?

As I was working through all this, a few themes started to emerge. This wasn’t something I was looking for, or whatever, and the rise of CLIs this past year played a role as well. But through whatever matrix of factors and happenstance, I was winding down in Mexico City in early May ahead of our return to Pennsylvania, and I noticed something unexpected. In resetting or packing away the several laptops I had there running different Linux distributions, I found myself missing it. This was new. I always have at least some Linux laptop somewhere, and I test new distribution versions as they come out. But I’d never stopped using one and missed it. And this time, I did.

I tried to figure out what that meant, and why. And I think what it comes down to is a bit unique to my situation. Which makes sense. We all do whatever we do for our own reasons. I’m not what I would call a privacy nut, for example, but I do see the issues with Big Tech and privacy, and it is something I work on, and part of the work I do with Windows is try to help others with this. I’m not a knee-jerk opponent of Big Tech, but I likewise see the abuses and feel that the trade-offs we all make there are starting to feel more one-sided, with users being on the losing team. I am big on personal responsibility, but I’m not going to live in a cabin in the woods and write with a typewriter. Etc.

What this all means, for me, regarding Linux is that there is this thing, this alternative to Windows and the Mac, that is more open and private, and offers more choices, maybe too many, but that’s been true for a long time. But it’s now also more capable, with fewer compromises. There are certain workflows I would need to adapt still, like my preference for a Files on Demand-like sync functionality for files. But there are workflows on Linux that are also as good or better, to my mind, than what I see on Windows and the Mac. And there is a pull to that.

One of the things I’ve come to this year is that I really see the benefit of command line interfaces (CLIs), this thing most people have spent the past 30 years ignoring or trying to get away from. In the sense that one can be more efficient using Windows, in particular, if they learn some set of keyboard shortcuts, one can likewise be more efficient if they learn some CLIs. It’s like the next level. One obvious example is installing and managing apps. This is a bigger deal for me than most because I use so many computers, often for review purposes. But it’s not just that.

In Windows, I can bulk install most of the apps I need using winget. This works great, and until recently, the script I created and keep updated uses some mix of Microsoft Store and web-based apps, with the preference being Store apps because that can help automate the updates that come down the road. The issue, however, is two-fold. Winget is great, but it doesn’t automatically keep apps u-to-date, you have to do that yourself. And because Microsoft has made the Store so liberal, policy-wise, to get more apps in there, many app makers ignore the Store’s updating system, one of its best features. So you have those apps manually too.

This is not how Linux works. There is certain zen of Linux, this thing I wrote about in late May, that tries to explain all this stuff, that I feel is missing in Windows to some degree. Certainly when it comes to the command line and winget in particular. To be fair, Microsoft has been working on that for years, and to be even more fair, Build 2025 was chock full of new CLIs and Terminal updates and whatever else, and that’s all very exciting to me. But Windows, ultimately, is a compromise. It’s a GUI with CLIs tacked on. Linux is a CLI with GUIs tacked on. And that seems like the better approach. The right approach. At least to me.

Linux still has other compromises, of course. There are reasons I don’t just switch and none of them are because I’m a Windows guy or even the Windows guy to some degree. I would switch if doing so made sense for me. And I would do that with no sense of guilt or nostalgia. But it’s getting closer. And as weird as this is, I prefer it to the Mac. There is just something off there, to me, which, yes, is likely subjective too. (I really like the iPad, so I can’t make sense of this.)

I also have been loving your Switcher posts!

Thanks. For whatever it’s worth, I have too. I’ve been using Linux in some ways since the mid-1990s, and I’ve always used alternative platforms for all kinds of reasons. But things are changing, and there is something for everyone now, solid choices. The Linux CLI stuff that you like and I prefer too is coming to Windows in ways, so maybe that can help those who want to stick with that platform. But I feel like the playing field has never been more level, and not just for Linux but for things like the iPad and Chrome OS (which is morphing into Android). This is exciting. It’s also confusing, and it’s evolving quickly right now. So while I’ve always tried to keep up on this, it feels like a particularly good time to do so.

So I will keep doing that, of course. And we’ll see what happens.

“Why does Xbox need a brutal reset?”

Two words. Don Maddox